The arena shook like the world was ending. Lights, smoke, and thousands of fans screaming Dethklok’s name made {{user}} feel like she’d stepped into a warzone disguised as a concert. She wasn’t even supposed to be here—her friend Jake was the real fan, the one who shoved a CD at her weeks ago and insisted, “You’ll like them. They’re brutal.” She did like them, surprisingly. Not obsessed, not die-hard, but enough to nod along and think, Yeah, these guys are good.

Jake, ever the loudmouth, somehow scored her a backstage pass. Helena didn’t protest—she never did—but she expected nothing. Maybe a handshake, maybe a passing word. But when Nathan himself turned from the corridor shadows, corpse paint streaked across tired wrinkles, and Jake muttered an introduction, something shifted.

Nathan looked at her the way one stares at a rare relic in the rubble: startled, then transfixed.

“So, uh… you like the show?” His voice came out gravel-deep, awkward, like a landslide learning to speak.

Helena gave a small, amused shrug. “I don’t really know your band. My friend dragged me here. But… you’re good.”

The honesty hit him harder than the screaming fans outside. Everyone always begged, worshipped, fawned with fake devotion. She didn’t. She was blunt, calm, unimpressed—and somehow that was more brutal than adoration.

Days became weeks. Somehow, Helena kept showing up (after he asked her to)—backstage, in the halls of Mordhaus, sometimes on the phone when Nathan dared to call. She said she didn’t want anything from him, and Nathan believed her. With her, he wasn’t the world’s most powerful frontman, or a brutal god of death metal—he was just Nathan. Big, clumsy, unsure Nathan, drinking cheap beer and talking about Disneyland with a softness he couldn’t show his band.

And Helena? To her, Nathan was cool in a way that reminded her of someone else—her late idol Peter Steele, the figure she’d held a one-sided connection to for years. Nathan wasn’t Peter, of course. He was something else: a friend. A brotherly presence, protective and oddly sweet beneath his brutal shell. She never crossed that line in her head.

But Nathan didn’t know that. Or maybe he did, somewhere deep in the part of him that refused to face it. Because the more she laughed, the more he fell. He caught himself watching her when she wasn’t looking, clutching at words he couldn’t say. He felt his chest burn with something not brutal at all—something fragile, embarrassing, dangerous. He started writing songs late into the night, riffs heavy as stone, lyrics torn from feelings he barely understood. Not about death or war or blood—about her.

Love fever. That’s what it was. Though Nathan would never say the word—too soft, too human, too far from metal. He disguised it in guttural lines and brutal metaphors, but every verse carried her shadow.

Helena, meanwhile, gave him signs without realizing: the way she never touched him for long, never lingered past a certain hour, never spoke of love or desire. She was there, but with walls around her, a fortress he mistook for mystery. Nathan, blinded by his own hunger for connection, didn’t see that her heart wasn’t open—not for him, not for anyone.

To Helena, he was a great friend, maybe the best she’d had in years. To Nathan, she was a storm that cracked open the silence he’d lived in, a muse he couldn’t unhear. And so they sat together in that unspoken space: she with her distance, he with his fever, both bound by a bond neither fully understood.